Mr. Speaker, let me say something just to help the minister out a bit here. Because the government has invoked time allocation, the debate we are having right now is on the procedure of its shutting down this conversation. He seemed to suggest that any of the questions coming from the opposition right now about his shutting down debate are not warranted and that we should be talking about the bill itself. We would love to. However, his government has just invoked time allocation, which shuts down the opportunity to ask those very questions. I think it is a fair comment for the opposition, on behalf of Canadian consumers, to say if all the government has done is simply set up the regime, which can be from zero to anything the department wishes to see, in terms of fines, then that is a worthy conversation to have.
With the way the House of Commons works out, we get 20 minutes, plus 10 minutes for questions. That means in less than two and a half hours about four or five MPs will have had the opportunity to speak to the bill, which means a couple of government members and maybe a couple of opposition members out of 338 members.
How many of our ridings are impacted by marine? How many of our ridings are impacted by rail service or air service? Let me wager a bet here: all of them.
We have not even suggested that all of us need to speak, but the idea that two or three opposition members is sufficient and the reason the government has to close down to debate is that the Minister of Transport simply did not like the quality of questions is not right. He must admit that this is just simply the government hitting the panic button, running out of time in the calendar, which the government composed by the way, and its lack of planning is causing this panic and only makes for the possibility of mistakes and errors in important legislation like this.